As a developer I had a slew of shortcuts and applications used daily. Visual Studio 6, 2003, 2005, 2008, SQL Client tools, WinMerge, Notepad++, Synergy, VMware (and lots and lots of VMs, multiple browsers, and on top of all that about 20 shortcuts to important directories, servers, test environments etc…
The Vista start menu is a lifesaver for getting to many of them quickly. However there are plenty of daily tasks that still require a relatively large amount of work to access (open a folder, jump through a few sub-folders, find a specific file and fire it off.
What tools/applications/utilities do you find to be the most beneficial to providing organized and fast access to all of your most frequently visited tools?
What are some tools that can be embedded on the task bar of Windows that provide similar functionality to drawers in Linux or stacks in OS X? My current quick-launch bar (and other folders added to the task bar) eat up tons of real estate and insist on opening new explorer windows to display sub-directories, which suffices but is still slow and polutes my desktop.
…can’t wait for tomorrow to get the Win 7 RC and its finally improved task bar
Launchy. I first heard about it from Scott Hanselman.